King Charles III ends the first visit to Australia by a reigning British monarch in 13 years Tuesday as anti-monarchists hope the debate surrounding his journey is a step toward an Australian citizen becoming head of state.
Charles and his wife, Queen Camilla, watched dancers perform at a Sydney Indigenous community center. The couple used tongs to cook sausages at a community barbecue lunch at the central suburb of Parramatta and later shook the hands of well-wishers for the last time during their visit outside the Sydney Opera House. Their final engagement was an inspection of navy ships on Sydney Harbor in an event known as a fleet review.
Charles’s trip to Australia was scaled down because he is undergoing cancer treatment. He arrives in Samoa on Wednesday.
Indigenous activist Wayne Wharton, 60, was arrested outside the opera house early Tuesday afternoon before the royals greeted the crowd.
“It will be alleged the man was acting in an abusive and threatening manner and had failed to comply with two previous move-on directions,” a police statement said. He was charged with failing to comply with a police direction and will appear in court on Nov. 5.
Wharton said he intended to serve Charles with a summons to appear in court on war crimes and for genocide but never got close to the couple.
The royal visit was “a slap in the face to every decent Aboriginal person and fair-minded person in Australia that’s tried to make a go of their lives,” Wharton told the AP after his arrest.
On Monday, Indigenous independent senator Lidia Thorpe yelled at Charles during a reception that he was not her king and Australia was not his land.
Wharton said he backed Thorpe “absolutely 100%.” He had protested with a small group of demonstrators outside a Sydney church service the couple attended on Sunday under a banner “Empire Built on Genocide.”
Esther Anatolitis, co-chair of the Australian Republic Movement, which campaigns for an Australian citizen to replace the British monarch as Australia’s head of state, said while thousands turned out to see the king and Camilla at their public engagements, the numbers were larger when his mother Queen Elizabeth II first visited Australia 70 years ago.
An estimated 75% of Australia’s population saw the queen in person during the first visit by a reigning British monarch in 1954.
“It’s understandable that Australians would be welcoming the king and queen, we also welcome them,” Anatolitis said. “But it doesn’t make any sense to continue to have a head of state appointed by birth right from another country.”
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